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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 27

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 27 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

Hermes, draw near, and to my pray'r incline, angel of Jove [Zeus], and Maia's son divine;

2

Primary

Studious of contests, ruler of mankind, with heart almighty, and a prudent mind.

3

Primary

Celestial messenger, of various skill, whose pow'rful arts could watchful Argus kill:

4

Primary

With winged feet, 'tis thine thro' air to course, O friend of man, and prophet of discourse:

5

Primary

Great life-supporter, to rejoice is thine, in arts gymnastic, and in fraud divine:

6

Primary

With pow'r endu'd all language to explain, of care the loos'ner, and the source of gain.

7

Primary

Whose hand contains of blameless peace the rod, Corucian, blessed, profitable God;

8

Primary

Of various speech, whose aid in works we find, and in necessities to mortals kind:

9

Primary

Dire weapon of the tongue, which men revere, be present, Hermes, and thy suppliant hear;

10

Primary

Assist my works, conclude my life with peace, give graceful speech, and me memory's increase.

Text notes and edition context

Work

Orphic Hymns

The Orphic Hymns compress cosmology, prayer, ritual address, and divine epithets into compact devotional poems especially suited to meditative and oracle-like reading; the corpus now also carries an Abel-based Greek witness aligned as honestly as possible against the existing Taylor English sequence.

Hymns | Original language: Ancient Greek

Late Hellenistic to early Imperial Greek religious poetry, often dated between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE

You are reading Hymn 27.

Primary Edition

Thomas Taylor

English | Verse

Late 18th-century English verse translation

Taylor's version is archaic, charged, and openly mystical, making it one of the strongest public-domain oracle-friendly English renderings of the Orphic Hymns.

This edition uses canonical hymn numbering and line-level segmentation, omitting the prefatory Musaeus proem from the main corpus model.

Source family: English aggregate translations

Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi | Public-domain source texts

English prose and verse classics consolidated into a single aggregate dataset.

Primary source: English aggregate translations | Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi.